Watch · M·A·C Backstage at Fashion Week
Defining M·A·C's backstage presence. Four cities. A modular brand system. The channel that pioneered real-time beauty reportage. And the program that seeded a $200M product.
Watch · M·A·C Backstage at Fashion Week
M·A·C had been backstage at fashion week before most beauty brands understood what a runway was.
They had the access. They had the artistry. What they didn't have was a system. Every fashion week arrived without a visual language, without a brand framework, without a way to translate backstage authority into content the audience could follow — and buy from.
The bi-annual trend book landed on press desks and stayed there. No digital extension. No real-time signal. A room full of cultural intelligence that went nowhere after the shows closed.
The opportunity was to turn M·A·C's best-kept secret into the thing the industry watched, season after season.
The first move was to give backstage a consistent identity. An evergreen, modular visual system that made every piece of content — across every city, every season — feel like it came from the same authoritative source.
Then came M·A·C TV. The brand's IGTV platform for real-time reportage: innovation, new launches, artistry, community. M·A·C was the first beauty brand on the platform doing it at this scale. Instagram used the work as a best-in-class example for the category.
I traveled across New York, London, Milan, and Paris every season, directing teams of videographers and photographers. Every show. Every backstage. Every trend, reported live.
→ Modular evergreen brand system for backstage
→ M·A·C TV — IGTV best-in-class, beauty category
→ 4 cities directed every season
→ 3 Stories + posts daily, runway to live in 3hrs
→ Bi-annual 250-page trend book
→ 10-minute seasonal trend recap film
→ Video: Char Alfonzo & Pellicule Films
→ Photo: GoRunway
One product was being tested backstage. The response built such momentum that M·A·C built an entire collection around it.
That product was Powder Kiss. The backstage program was the signal that proved it. The community engagement, the earned media, the artistry responses — all of it came through the channels and the system we built.
When M·A·C decided to build the Powder Kiss collection and shoot the campaign, we shot it. Char Alfonzo and I. The campaign ran in Times Square.
Two hundred million dollars in revenue. Two months.
The backstage program didn't just report the trends. It created one.
The backstage brand system ran for six bi-annual seasons. M·A·C TV became the benchmark for real-time beauty content on IGTV. The trend book went from a press desk artifact to part of a live content ecosystem. And the program that documented a product being tested backstage generated more revenue in two months than most campaigns generate in a year.